City Council in discussion/Photo by City of Amarillo
By Noah Dawson
I will be voting no on all three props put forward by the city this November. I’ve discussed at some length my views on the items on the Live in West Texas podcast, but I wanted to discuss the props here in my column. This week, I’m going to be discussing what may be the most confusing one, Proposition C, to try to make some sense out of its confusing wording and what passing it would do to Amarillo.
First, here is the full wording of the proposition: “To amend Article V, Section 12(a) of the Amarillo City Charter to provide for the Mayor and Councilmembers to meet to qualify for office on the day of the election canvass and thereafter meet not less than twenty-four times per calendar year.”
Behind this confusing wording is a simple meaning: City council will only meet half as often as they do now. One thing that is important to note though is that it is not as simple as going from weekly to bi-weekly meetings. Instead, the council has the ability to meet when they want, as long as they meet the required number of times each year.
What does this mean for Amarillo? Well, as everybody knows, the ability for the people to have a direct line of communication with their representatives is basically the point of our political system. In the past, Amarillo had that in the form of a public comment section at weekly city council meetings held in the afternoon. This gave people a public venue to directly address their representatives in person, allowing them to bring their concerns before their local government. This proposition is yet another attack on this ability made by our city council. It began as Mayor Nelson suddenly deciding to use her ability to enforce rules of decorum in a much more active way, including kicking a person out of a meeting for recording it and arresting a person for clapping. This has further expanded to policing the tone and word choice used by those speaking at meetings by prohibiting “personal attacks,” with the city refusing to give clear indications of what precisely is and isn’t allowed on multiple occasions. Many, including myself, have criticized these actions, and some members of the public have alleged that some of the actions taken haven’t even been legal.
Then they moved the city council meetings from being late in the afternoon to early in the morning, when people are busy bringing their children to school and heading to work. Then they caused more confusion by abruptly moving them to the middle of the day and separating the public comment section from the regular meeting agenda. This made it harder for people to speak unless they showed up precisely on time to a meeting occurring in the middle of a week day. Also, due to a technicality, it meant that the city council had no way to respond to any comments, even ones related to the agenda for the regular meeting, as public comment was legally classified as a separate meeting. It also means that months of public comment meetings might not have had their minutes properly approved, as the language used in city council agendas at that point referred to “approval of the City Council minutes for the meeting held on” the previous week, despite the fact that the regular meeting and public comment meeting were separate meetings.
More recently, they have restricted the ability of people to bring any issue before the council. Now, you can only speak on items explicitly listed on that week’s agenda. The public comment meeting is gone, replaced with a public address portion of the regular meeting.
Now, the city wants to have fewer meetings and a more flexible schedule. If passed, people likely won’t even know week to week if a meeting will be occurring. The city claims that the reason they want fewer meetings is because there are weeks where there isn’t enough city business to justify a meeting. Why not at least have a meeting with public comment? The beauty of regular meetings, especially weekly ones is that they are predictable. If a citizen wants to show up, they can plan their schedule around the meeting.
Over a year ago, I wrote a piece titled “City Council Further Isolates Itself from Citizens,” about a change where fact-based questions would no longer be answered until after a speaker was done speaking. As time has gone on, they have only done more to further that divide.
(I also want to say, as I was writing this, I noticed my colleague, Trent Rosser, author of “Rosser’s Ramblings,” had written about this same subject. If you need any more convincing why Proposition C is bad, I encourage you to go read his piece “City Council Bypasses the Citizens, Again!”)